Peter Brown on Being a Schmo & Being God Simultaneously
Peter's rare elixir & some diary reflections
“As nearly as I can tell, I am a realized being. I am the real thing.
And yet I’m a jerk. I’m a semi-functional human being with a ragged, poorly integrated personality and obsessions and lusts and—you know—I’m just a schmo.
And yet I’m God.
So, go figure.
But that’s the good news: To find that you’re God, you don’t need to not be a schmo, or we’d all be screwed. [Laughs.]
I mean, that’s the fallacy of simplistic spirituality: ‘I have to correct my schmo-ness. I have to somehow solve the dilemma of my pathetic failings.’
But fortunately that’s not the case, fortunately that’s not the case.
You already are God.
You can’t not be God.
So it doesn’t matter that you’re a schmo.
And God, what a delightful fact, what a potent fact that is.
People are so intrinsically full of self-loathing that everyone entertains the basic assumption that anything that’s good has to involve me somehow being better or being a better way than I am.
And it turns out that that’s just a fallacy. That’s just not true.
And thank God that’s the case, or we’d all be screwed.
Because you can’t ever not be yourself…”
— Peter Brown
Man, I love Peter so much.
What an absolutely hilarious and epic banger of a quote. Classic Peter.
I always return to his words.
That opening quote was found in this dragonfire transmission from Peter:
(It can also be found on YouTube if you don’t use Spotify, along with 84 more hours of Peter)
Peter is a cutting technology.
Few have ever articulated something that cuts so directly to God’s naked transresolvable fullness here and now.
It was cool to notice yesterday how simply listening to this Peter-transmission for an hour while walking and working out really loosened up my identification with my current stories of life, who I am, my family, my marriage, etc
I intuitively sensed it was time to loosen up the story a bit and there was an immediate sense of relief, greater freedom, laughter, wonder, playfully noticing the Now as a kind of dancing light show
This feels like it immediately opens up greater acceptance of the present situation (partially due to deeply remembering that I cannot ever actually precisely ‘know’ what the present situation is)…
As well as greater fluidity and creativity to be able to see new pathways within what had seemed like challenges
Thank you, Peter.
Here’s another zinger from that transmission:
“There’s absolutely nothing that is resolvable—that can be finally realized, achieved, grasped.
[…]
That paltry fact is what realization is made of.”
— Peter Brown
And here are a few more reflections from me on reality’s suprapersonal and transresolvable nature. Maybe they’ll be clarifying or helpful for someone:
God is suprapersonal and transresolvable
Suprapersonal: Beyond yet inclusive of all persons or individuated emanations
Transresolvable: Beyond yet inclusive of all (mythopoetic) definitions
Persons and definitions arise as spontaneous emanations of this God-nature
This God-nature intimately includes all its emanations yet is also forever beyond them
Forever more-and-other-than them
Right here and now
These words refer only to the direct reality of your immediate experience
Check it out and see for yourself what it is
Wonder of wonders, the simple fact of reality here and now turns out to be the ultimate astonishment
If I were to distill all this as simply as possible, what would I say?
Peter was a great master of a certain form of advanced spirituality
His repeated message was basically:
Notice that the only thing you ever experience is this timeless flash of mysterious radiant presence here and now. Notice that you do not know what this flash is. Stay with that non-knowing-ness whenever you feel like it. Be loose with it, be playful. As you engage this ‘yoga of radiant presence,’ it changes you and liberates you in profound ways
Engaging Peter’s yoga essentially opens up whole new ways/modes of being with reality, beholding reality, dancing with reality
Reality is then re-enchanted—revealed as an ever-fresh flavorful fullness
A wholeness and finality that is always already complete — its essence does not change
You gradually learn to sorta ‘melt into’ and rest as this changeless presence/essence
The inherent flavor of this presence/essence is one of suprapersonal Love, Grace, Peace, Flow, Freedom, Artistry, Innocence, Omnipresence, Transfinitude, Supreme Intelligence
This is why it is appropriate to call reality ‘God(dess)’ — or to employ any of our loftiest, most evocative superlatives
Because even these loftiest descriptors do not come close
Yet paradoxically, all this grand language can also be misleading — because people get the idea they’re looking for some extraordinary mystical fireworks or flashbang grenades
When really — as Peter was a master of pointing out — all that is ever being referred to is your own immediate (everyday) experience
Sure, astounding mystical experiences might come and go sometimes
But the real juice is in noticing that THIS-HERE-NOW is *always* THAT
Always That Miraculous Luminous All-Inclusive Fullness
Totality.
Now.
This can be felt
This can be felt and known most intimately
You can feel and know yourself to be a non-separate emanation of Almighty God
And this can look as mundane as you biting into a tongue-moistening cheeseburger
The shortcut — as Peter was fond of pointing out — is to simply notice that you don’t know what the cheeseburger is
And you don’t know what you are
And you don’t know what the restaurant is
In one sense you know all of them utterly intimately
Yet in another sense they’re all an absolutely bottomless mystery
A continuum of textural weirdness spontaneously exploding forth from nowhere with zero duration
The past is nowhere to be found, the future is nowhere to be found
All that you ever actually experience is This Unitary Eternal Ever-Morphing Nowness
And when you simply pause and notice that fact — really just look at it — it rapidly starts working on you
It starts revealing itself to you
It “shows you what it is,” as Peter liked to say
Essentially, Peter found a wizardly hack — a way to short-circuit our habituated reality-tunnel
Well, really, he wielded a vast smorgasbord of hacks and tricks in a supremely entertaining way, as a true trickster-mage
Yet many of them boiled down to this: You just repeatedly encounter immediate experience as a living impenetrable mystery
You let your ordinary life be seen as the truly unsayable twinkling tapestry of strangeness that it is
And you just stare at that whenever you feel like it
You stare at the strangeness
You let yourself feel its multidimensional energetic buzzingness rippling through all the sense-fields
You’re not trying to change or improve or achieve anything
You’re just re-sensitizing yourself to the full-contact immersive bizarreness that life actually consists of — a lot like a return to ‘infant mind’
It’s all just “wow, wow, wow,” as Peter would say
And in this act of penetrative seeing, it’s possible to basically puncture your habituated reality-tunnel
In one fell swoop, you essentially guillotine your way through many layers of conditioning — just with a simple act of really looking squarely at unknown reality
In doing so, if you’re lucky, if you’re ripe, there may be a genuine opening
An opening that “lets the Light in,” as CoryaYo once sang
The Light that has always surrounded you
The Light you are made of
The Light of your very being
The Light of God
The Light that is — in my estimation — the only true source of healing and therefore mankind’s only true hope of breaking the millennia-long curse of cyclical idiotic violence that yet plagues our forlorn species
A great irony and paradox is that this Light is quite literally always continuously staring us in the face
Literally all you are ever seeing is the Light-Filled Face Of God
This is not a metaphor
This is ~as close as words can get to the literal truth
We are all emanations of a Unitary Super-Organismic Infinite Lovingly Intelligent Energy-Being
All of life is That
Yet for the most part mankind cannot presently see it
Even though it’s all we ever see
All we have ever known
It is truly miraculous how God is able to ‘pull the wool over our eyes’ — His own eyes — to such an all-encompassing extent
The ancients called this ‘Maya’ — the great illusion; a truly savage parlor trick
How are we not able to see the Unified Field of Love that continuously stares us in the face?
In short: We think we know what it is. We believe our thought-based stories about what it is, thereby blocking ourselves from seeing its true face.
And so it goes…
If there were no forgetfulness, there would be no remembrance
If there were no cage, there would be no liberation
Thus the Great Wheel turns
Thus the Ouroboros chases its dragon tail
And we dance on, playing our wild ‘n’ wacky roles in the cosmic Lila
I suppose it’s pretty epic to be on Earth during what appears to be the end of a dark age amidst the early stirrings of a planetary awakening
It’s also heartbreakingly sad for me though
Like sometimes I just wanna shake our neanderthal-like species by the shoulders and scream, “Wake the fuck up already. This is not difficult. Just fucking stop killing each other, retards. It’s not hard. Stop abusing kids. It’s not hard. Are you really this fucking stupid.”
Meanwhile, though, I go on eating factory-farmed cheeseburger-flavored cow-flesh because my body seems to tell me to
Like Peter I guess I’m a jerk and a schmo
I guess the karmic echoes stop when they stop
I’m not one to be defeatist about it, though
So I go on creating art(ifacts) and soul-technologies encoded with God’s Love (if I’m lucky), in hopes of doing my part to pulse heart-awakening signals into the ether
And I go on prayerfully surrendering to ongoing personal healing — letting the Light in deeper and deeper, to every cell, every inner child, every layer of the body, every ancestor and descendant
Wild how deep the rabbit hole goes — just seems to keep on going
I sense our destiny now
It comes through in a deep way
It’s as if an enormous karmic Wheel has been spinning in one direction
And even though many of us are awakening to the tragic violence of the way the Wheel’s been spinning…
It keeps on spinning that way, because it has a damn awful lot of momentum
It will require an immense shift in awareness for our species to get this Wheel moving in another direction
Imagine one billion Sisyphus or Atlas-like figures shouldering boulders to try to budge the damn Wheel a few inches in a new direction
It will be a monumental collective act of Love to do this
And I believe we are doing it
And it’s humbling to be part of that
Seems likely I’ll keep on tryna become Love all the days of my life
Become the Love that I am
And share that Love
For my daughter and myself and my wife and my family and friends and all beings
Because, on one hand, yes, as Peter said, “you can’t ever not be yourself”…
You’re always gonna be what you are
And your essence is unchanging
Yet…
We can bring forth more of that Loving Essence
We can become more Transparent to God’s Love
It’s not about ‘self-improvement’
It’s about Heartful Devotion
It’s about the Willingness to Serve
The Willingness to Open the Christ Heart
The Willingness to Be Stripped Naked Again And Again
The Willingness to Walk Each Other Home
The Willingness to Let Divine Fire Burn What Is Less True
The Willingness to Bake The Bread Of Love Daily
The Willingness to Be Engulfed In Sacred Inferno —
So as to Help Light The Way For Our Grandchildren
This is what it’s about
For me, at least
You’re free to decide what it’s about
For you
I love you,
J
“Here I am, Lord
Is it I, Lord?
I have heard You,
Calling in the night
I will go, Lord
If you lead me
I will hold your people
In my Heart”
